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Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical

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Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Plants in Contemporary Poetry Examining how poets engage with and mediate botanical life, Plants in Contemporary Poetry affords a glimpse into the ontologies, epis- temologies, and semiospheres of flora and, by extension, the natural world. Highlighting the botanical obsessions of seminal poets writing in English today, the book calls attention to the role of language in de- constructing the cultural codes that limit an understanding of plants as intelligent beings. Ryan argues that, as poetic thought harmonizes with vegetality, writers gain direct knowledge of, and profound inspiration from, the botanical world. Plants in Contemporary Poetry provides a timely intervention in the prevailing tendency of ecocritical scholarship to date to examine animal, rather than plant, subjectivities and life- worlds. A sensuous return to vegetal being is actualized in this study through a focus on the contemporary poetries of Australia, England, and the United States. The lively disquisition traverses a cross section of contemporary poetic genres from confessionalism and experimentalism to radical pastoralism and ecopoetry. Through readings of eight poets, including Louise Glück, Les Murray, Mary Oliver, and Alice Oswald, Plants in Contemporary Poetry centers on the idea of the botanical imagination and proposes a unique conceptual model the author calls vegetal dialectics. Drawing from developments in neuro-botany and contributing to the area of critical plant studies, the book also develops phytocriticism as a method for responding to the lack of attention to plants in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the environmental humanities. This ground-breaking study reminds readers that poetic imagination is as important as scientific rationality to appreciating the mysteries of plants on an increasingly imperiled planet. The book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, en- vironmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of particu- lar interest to students and researchers in critical plant studies. John Charles Ryan is a poet and scholar who holds appointments as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Arts at the University of New England in Australia and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. From 2012 to 2015, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Communi- cations and Arts at Edith Cowan University. His teaching and research cross between the environmental and digital humanities. He has con- tributed in particular to Australian and Southeast Asian ecocriticism and the emerging field of critical plant studies. He is the author, co- author, editor, or co-editor of 10 books, including the Bloomsbury ti- tle Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media (2014, as co-author), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2017, as co-editor and contributor), and Southeast Asian Ecocriticism: Theories, Practices, Prospects (Lexington Books, 2017, as editor and contributor). This page intentionally left blank Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies Rebecca Ann Bach Race Matters, Animal Matters Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1838–1934 Lindgren Johnson Plants in Contemporary Poetry Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination John Charles Ryan Plants in Contemporary Poetry Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination John Charles Ryan First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of John Charles Ryan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-18628-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64395-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction: The Botanical Imagination 1 2 Sacred Ecologies of Plants: The Vegetative Soul in Les Murray’s Poetry 27 3 That Porous Line: Mary Oliver and the Intercorporeality of the Vegetal Body 53 4 It Healeth Inward Wounds: Bioempathic Emplacement and the Radical Vegetal Poetics of Elisabeth Bletsoe 81 5 From Stinking Goose-foot to Bastard Toadflax: Botanical Humor in Alice Oswald’s Weeds and Wild Flowers 107 6 Consciousness Buried in Earth: Vegetal Memory in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris 135 7 That Seed Sets Time Ablaze: Judith Wright and the Temporality of Plants 163 8 On the Death of Plants: John Kinsella’s Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia 190 9 Every Leaf Imagined With Us: Vegetal Hope and the Love of Flora in Joy Harjo’s Poetry 214 Index 241 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia, for an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, and the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the School of Arts. Both institutions provided invaluable assistance during the writing of this book. My appreciation goes to Karen Raber, the edi- tor of the Routledge series Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, who was supportive of the project from its germinal stages. The editors and reviewers of the journals in which three chapters previ- ously were published offered careful advice on style, structure, and con- tent. Sincere thanks are due to Irene Sanz Alonso, Dianna Bell, Elaine Nogueira-Godsey, Flys Junquera Carmen Lydia, Bron Taylor, and Ted Toadvine. A version of Chapter 2 was originally published as “Sacred Ecology of Plants: The Vegetative Soul in the Botanical Poetry of Les Murray.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10.4 (2016): 459–484. My sincere thanks to Equinox Publishing for their kind per- mission to reprint the material. A version of Chapter 7 was originally published as “That Seed Sets Time Ablaze: Vegetal Temporality in Judith Wright’s Botanical Poetics.” Environmental Philosophy (2016). doi:10.5840/envirophil2016121343. A version of Chapter 8 was originally published as “On the Death of Plants: John Kinsella’s Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 7.2 (2016): 113–133. This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction The Botanical Imagination Imagination attempts to have a future. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1971, 8) Of the prevailing ideas about plants that inhabit the imagination, ballis- tics, I suggest, would not be at the top of the leaderboard. We tend to as- sociate flora with aesthetics (beautiful flowers, delectable fruits, sublime forests) and poetics (poetry and poetic thoughts about flowers, fruits, and forests) rather than biomechanics, namely the rapid and occasion- ally targeted expulsion of projectiles. After all, for the most part, we think botanical life is sessile (unmoving), silent (lacking address), passive (acted upon by mobile life-forms), and, of course, pleasing (agreeable to the senses). Granted there are notable exceptions to the master narrative of the vegetal world as, indeed, vegetative in the pejorative sense of the descriptor as dull and unthinking. For instance, carnivorous orchids en- snare and consume insects, touch-me-nots recoil when contacted, and skunk cabbage emits a fetor that seduces pollinators but repulses people. On the whole, however, humankind envisages plants as mundane ele- ments of the scenery (Pollan 2015); as the stuff we eat, process, and oth- erwise appropriate (Allen and Hatfield 2004); and as accoutrements to the less obscure—and more emotionally resonant and ethically valued— lives of animals and other non-plants (Taylor and Twine 2014). As a case in point from the history of philosophy, in Creative Evolution (1998, published originally in 1907), Henri Bergson reinscribed the age-old du- alism demarcating between the zoological realm and its botanical coun- terpart. The thinker contended that “we should define the animal by sensibility and awakened consciousness, the vegetable by consciousness asleep and by insensibility” (Bergson 1998, 112). From his standpoint, the photosynthetic evolution of the plant—its uncanny ability to synthe- size nutrients from water and carbon dioxide—“enables it to dispense with movement and so with feeling” (1998, 112). Like many commentators both before and since him, Bergson framed animality in terms of the presumed deficiencies of vegetality. Despite his intimation that consciousness inheres within plants—albeit as a latent 2 Introduction potential—he propounded a cerebrocentric (brain-centered) and, more precisely, neurocentric (nervous system-focused) model of intelligence that brought “two tendencies” into
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